Methodology of human-geographical researches: contemporary approaches and methods

Abstract

Problem Statement. Human geography is a science that responds extremely quickly to the new today's demands and challenges. Thanks to the multiplier effect, it has the opportunity to be integrated into a powerful range of contemporary unresolved scientific issues and to propose its approaches to their study and solution based on the robust methodology and development of new research tools. A qualitative new development level of human geography as science in Ukraine and the world requires urgently general rethinking of the prerequisites, goals, and methods of scientific research, the question of the relationship between theoretical and empirical ones in scientific papers. The triune complex "society-nature-economy" and the study of the peculiarities of their interrelationships and contradictions form a wide range of opportunities for human-geographical research. Research Methodology. The article uses the methods of analysis, synthesis, and dialectical method. The authors have summarized and described the set of original methods of human geography, revealed contemporary approaches and substantiated the peculiarities of the methods of researching the development trajectory of the human-geographical objects, multidimensional spatial analysis and multidimensional classification, spatial interaction of social and geographical objects (IFI modeling), developed and tested by the scientists of the Department of Human Geography and Regional Studies of V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. This paper aims to highlight the methodological foundations of human-geographical research, reveal modern approaches and substantiate the human-geographical approach, and consider the content and features of the use of original methods of human-geographical research. In particular, the coverage of methodological approaches and justification of the human-geographical approach and disclosure of new methods of spatial analysis of the human-geographical process: the study of the spatial interaction of the human-geographical objects (IFI-modelling) and the study of social and geographical systems in the normalized multidimensional space. Results. The paper describes in detail the possibilities of using original human-geographical methods to solve contemporary issues. A detailed analysis of the application of these methods allows scientists and researchers to use and solve similar or other types of problems effectively. Scientific novelty and practical significance. The paper presents an exhaustive set of original methods for spatial analysis of the territory and provides an algorithm for their use. The authors provided various human-geographical research areas and tested the original methods.